Surprisingly capable of adapting the fear of a phone call for the current generation, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is scarier for its lack of caller ID than it is for the reasons behind it. A teen leaving messages for the dead is shocked to see he receives texts back. There are people out there sending texts and receiving nothing back from the living. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone will prey on that fear accidentally and unknowingly because the dim-witted, loose structure of this Netflix original hasn’t much steam elsewhere. Despite featuring the unsung hero of horror Donald Sutherland, this John Lee Hancock-directed piece fails to find a level playing field for its rather timid premise, based on a Stephen King novella of the same name.
As lukewarm a horror this is, Hancock is trying as much as he can to boil the horrors over, but the quick-cut sigh of relief with the press of a mobile phone button is hard to take seriously. The tone of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is a drab affair, a weak showcase of horror tropes that died out a decade ago. Slow cameras edging closer to buildings used as establishing shots give the underwhelming first appearances of characters, places and the different faces that are going to plague this piece for the next hour and a half. Dismal stuff, which is somewhat disheartening considering how solid a pairing Sutherland and leading man Jaeden Martell make for. King’s presence, however, is completely untouched. It feels completely removed from the usual horror tropes King’s prose and the subsequent adaptations of his work would present.
Eventually though that back and forth isn’t enough. The simplicity of the shot-reverse-shot lucidity made clear and cutting at all the wrong moments, reliant solely on performance to carry the move rather than anything implemented in the editing studio. Cut after cut, and eventually, the one layer of depth is peeled away to reveal, shock and horror, a drab riff on a Black Mirror plot. Envious audiences should be of the days without mobile phones, apparently. 5G masts, horrible kids and the implicit horrors of being over-reliant on tech are very difficult to take seriously when the generalities and the lack of jargon are conjured up with little confidence from those performing. That lack of understanding is not just in the script and the addiction to the screen but in what it means for those that buy new phones, who receive flimsy plastic bags to house their top-of-the-range iPhone 4.
At the core of new horror is a flimsy mistrust of telephones, technology and the consequences of it. Some are better prepared to deal with it as the creatives are more in touch with what makes the highs and lows of technology so addictive. Charlie Brooker managed that with a scattershot variation of a handful of Black Mirror episodes. Hancock’s work on Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is a laughable attempt to replicate that, its strokes of horror never moving past the phantom text messages Craig (Martell) receives from beyond the grave. Considering most people are only receiving texts from Dominos or their bank, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone must add a “what if” tag to its already preposterous conclusions, etched in stone by those that don’t understand the actual pratfalls of tech addiction.
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